Not making any friends: Rachel Howard explores the “unlikable” narrator who won her over, despite efforts to the contrary, in Jean Rhys’ shrewd, heartbreaking, and pitiless novel Voyage in the Dark.
There are no zombies or vampires in Brad Watson’s new collection, Aliens in the Prime of Their Lives (W.W. Norton, 2010), but there are plenty of folks who act like they’re either dead or from another planet. And, yes, many of Watson’s characters are “aliens”—not green creatures with large heads, but alienated, isolated. They are people who wander through life without an anchor, who don’t feel the pull of gravity.
